Eliminating undesirable people and prickly political minorities has been practiced by despotic governments for a long time. Our human history is replete with governments’ eliminating certain sectors of their own populations or slaughtering opponents in their villages and in their beds. Some people may be uncomfortable with this historical perspective and suggest that in our enlightened times, such butchery is no longer accepted. That attitude, Dear Reader, is what is known as a “pipe dream.” For all of our potential to imagine, create and build functional beauty, many of us allow the beast of sin or inhumanity to rule us. We have so much potential for good, and yet, we are severely flawed. Consider the episodes of genocide and mass murder in recent decades. This list is not exhaustive but there were Cambodians, Rwandans, Serbs, The Nazis, the Kurds, baby girls in China all represent either perpetrators or victims of heinous mass crimes. Progressives should be ecstatic with the continued human destruction of our own.
In 1968 Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist ( a freakin’ butterfly expert), released his legacy work, “The Population Bomb,” a woeful prediction of a planet (ours) overrun by people with inadequate resources to sustain human life. Liberals, who are now Progressives, lauded Ehrlich’s tome and have been dedicated to his themes for the past four decades. In fact, the Supreme Court of the United States was so enamored with Ehrlich’s thesis that shortly thereafter it discovered a formerly non-existent right to legally execute unborn children in the United States ( Roe v. Wade, 1973). With the deadly combination of almost constant warfare and legal abortion, the lefties who are squeamish about excessive population growth should be smugly satisfied. In our various global incursions we are sacrificing young men and women (mostly men) in the prime of their lives, and certainly abortion represents a pre-emptive approach to population limitation by eliminating the child before it reaches breeding age. The government has been complicit in this clumsy attempt at population control by its consistent funding of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.
Although it may seem to be a feasible argument to some, large government necessarily must be a major role player when there are vital policy issues that include divisions among the populace. But a constitutionally limited government would not be as actively involved in the social issues that tear the nation apart. True, the states would be facing those issues, and it’s possible that any given life or death issue may have 50 different solutions among all the states. So what? In life affirming issues having one or more states that value life and nurture it is much better than our present-day circumstances wherein the government promotes much that is anti-life and certainly anti-individual. When government becomes too large and unwieldy, the natural inclination is to become more demanding and despotic and to limit resistance or protest. By endorsing the Ehrlich proposition of stressful overpopulation and also by encouraging and funding the radical feminist arguments for abortion, an impersonal monstrosity such as the United States’ Federal Government can treat individual lives indifferently. That ingrained indifference leads to multiple deployments for police actions and conflicts because the individuals are not significant. Their loss and their families’ grief are meaningless blips on the sensibility of an over sized governing apparatus.
This entire discussion springs from my personal mental gymnastics about the proper role for government regarding some of the most critical issues about life. Certainly because of its constitutional mandate to provide for the common defense, the federal government does have the capacity and the duty to order the military, guard, reserves and militia into harm’s way. One would hope that it happens so infrequently that the leaders of government do not rashly pursue military engagements. As in any other aspect of life, frequent repetition of acts that were once novel makes the action more commonplace and ordinary. Our national leadership has treated the U.S. military like a Welcome Wagon bully by dispatching them all over the globe to intervene in disputes that have been raging for decades….even centuries. I suspect that in the highest corridors of government respect and concern for individuals who must serve, fight and perhaps perish has been blunted. The minimization of the value of life leads directly to the diminishment of the worth of the individual which exaggerates the power of groups within the body politic.
Groups merge into democratic factions that value “members,” but carry no brief for life itself or the individual. My final analysis is that a nation that does not celebrate or nourish individualism is not committed to the preservation and protection of life. A country that does not cherish the lives of its individual citizens loses its moral authority to exist. After all, the government is an institution developed to allow the people to work together for common goals without excessive intervention. Cavalier attitudes about individual lives cannot be a universally accepted national policy. Life, individual life, and liberty must be the latchkeys for entering the hall of government’s moral reason for existing. A government that values neither life nor individuals has forfeited its moral foundation and has no right to its own life.
